You could call me
a “matchmaker,” said Levy Yitzhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret
recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at
the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like,
imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s
matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling
kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys
for 10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to
desperate patients in the States for 160,000 dollars. The accusations have
shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that
organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the
New Jersey Real-Time News.

Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19, was shot and taken away by Israeli soldiers. The
body was returned stitched together from the belly to the neck.

On the question of
how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: “Quite a lot. And I have never
failed,” he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis
Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National
Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that
organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in
other places of the world as well. 5-6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent
of the world’s kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to
Delmonici.

Young Palestinian men throwing stones and bottles at Israeli soldiers in the
northern West Bank. In this area, Bilal Achmed Ghanan was shot to death and cut
up in a hospital. "Our sons are being used as organ reserves," claim the
Palestinians.

Countries
suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the
organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor
strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as
the country’s organ reserve - a very serious accusation, with enough question
marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an
investigation about possible war crimes.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum
being led away by FBI agents. Rosenbaum is alleged to have functioned as a
middleman in the illegal organ trafficking scheme.

Israel has
repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and
transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with
Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European
countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

Half of the
kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been
bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health
authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a
conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a
medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country
takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business -
on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved
in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5,
2003).

In the summer of
1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ
shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register
for postmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local
newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of
weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No
fewer than 35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been
500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter,
wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in
line for a kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45
people in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign
was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the
West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead,
with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies
terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a
dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of
autopsied bodies.

I was in the area
at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN
staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that
organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything
about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around
interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza -
meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before
being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young
stone-thrower Bilal Ahmed Ghanan.

It was close to
midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the
outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West Bank. The
two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still, waiting, like silent
shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains,
walls, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a
full view toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the
village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was now a
closed-off military zone - not even a cat could move outdoors without risking
its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night was only interrupted by
quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to the
tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used
the village’s carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to
put out of action was Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian
youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the
leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple
of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the Nablus
mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught meant torture and death
for these boys - they had to stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal
made an exception, when for some reason, he walked unprotected by the carpentry
workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe
the boys were out of food and needed to restock.

Everything went
according to plan for the Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their
cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly aimed through the
broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the
triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who
witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two
soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the
stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty
stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN
and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for
wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take
care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly
wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a
military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his
family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager
recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported
Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place
for his final rest. “Captain Yahya is the worst of them all,” the villager
whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green
fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by
the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the
sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as
they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his
chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just
what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first
young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in
the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our
sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told
me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Mahmud and Nafes from
Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead
and autopsied.

- Why are
they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What
happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy,
against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies
returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed
off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted? Nafes’s uncle was
upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of
the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the
killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations
of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a
routine basis, he said. Bilal Ahmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in
various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of
death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over,
hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home et cetera. The 133 people
killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims,
went through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians
- of which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that
Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of
organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware
of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate,
as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian
men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under
tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to
chin.

It’s time to bring
clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has
taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.